Easy conversion of your old 8mm film to digital with the Canon EOS 5D Mark II

James Miller sent us his “quick guide on how to get 8mm footage direct to sensor on the Canon EOS 5D Mark II” which is pretty cool if you’ve got a bunch of old 8mm films (maybe old family movies) that you’d like to convert to digital without paying an arm and a leg. Transfer of old movies was always a mysterious idea… maybe it isn’t so any more. Thanks to James! (James, can I send you all my old slides this week? Got a solution for those? HA)

The method

This is my method for transferring 8mm footage using the Canon 5Dmk2 in real time. The results are very good for such a fast method if you cannot afford the money or time for frame scanning.

00:42 – It very important to use a flat type LED’s not the dome shaped ones. The dome shape LED’s will give you lots of blooming and the focus will drift at the edges making you suspect the lens.

00:58 – I drilled 3 holes in the body of the projector for the LED flexible light strip, behind where the original bulb used to sit. I mask out light I don’t want projected with putty. The position of the lights helps mask out some of the scratches. I need to add another couple of (horizontal) lights either side of the centre light.

01:29 – I modified the original projector lens to try and achieve a flat field image. Made from the rear element from a Carl Zeiss Flektogon 35mm and attached to the original lens tube with a bit a tape no less. You could use standard lens and there are some very nice ones out there.

03:08 – Utilising the body from the old 35mm lens, it proved a good way in shielding the projector from light pollution, I also added a 12mm extension tube. A lens cloth draped over the front further seals the light from entering, of course you could just film in very low light.

00:12 – I put 2 drive belts on the motor, this slowed the motor down just enough to reduce the shutter flicker. The Canon 5Dmk2 was set to 24p and 1/50 for our electrical phase.

ISO ranged from base up to 1000, depending on exposure of original film. The footage is fine at ISO 1000 but this could be reduced by using a more powerful flat lens LED.

03:30 – Focus and frame size changed by moving the projector or camera and adjusting the screw type lens. Try and focus on the film grain and not the scratches.

00:37 – I removed the internal mask for 8mm & S8mm aspects at the gate to project an unrestricted image into the camera. You gain areas that are hidden but they have the perfs though them and you see the top and bottom of the next and previous frame, but you can re-mask in post. If it’s personal footage you want to see everything on the frame, some times it makes the difference.

You can use the crop sensor DSLR’s but the lens would need changing or modifying unless you wanted a cropped image. On this lens and projector I can not bring the camera near enough without fouling on the body of the camera or projector body to get a full image captured.

I have tried to make this project as accessible as possible and apart from the camera, all the items are fairly cheap to pick up.

This is an amazing tutorial. I would love pictures though becausae I'm not too good with fiddling around with something as permanent as drilling holes into precious film! Especially if all those rolls in storage are pretty treasured memories. I'd probably be safer off printing them out and scanning the hard copy into a storage harddrive.

Ingenious. An old friend of the family - now in her 80s has a huge stack of 8mm films. She never watches them; in fact, nobody does. Would love to do something with them. Thanks so much for this. Amazing combination of old and new.

[…] Nothing says “analog” like a shoebox full of old videotapes, Super 8 movies and slides. Even if you wanted to watch them (or subject friends/kids to them), digging out the old projector or VCR is a dicey proposition. Converting film to video or digital storage is possible to achieve DIY, but can be daunting and/or expensive — although with an HDSLR, the results can be pretty cool. […]

[…] Nothing says “analog” like a shoebox full of old videotapes, Super 8 movies and slides. Even if you wanted to watch them (or subject friends/kids to them), digging out the old projector or VCR is a dicey proposition. Converting film to video or digital storage is possible to achieve DIY, but can be daunting and/or expensive — although with an HDSLR, the results can be pretty cool. […]

[…] Nothing says “analog” like a shoebox full of old videotapes, Super 8 movies and slides. Even if you wanted to watch them (or subject friends / kids to them), digging out the old projector or VCR is a dicey proposition. Converting film to video or digital storage is possible to achieve DIY, but can be daunting and/or expensive — although with an HDSLR, the results can be pretty cool. […]

[…] Nothing says “analog” like a shoebox full of old videotapes, Super 8 movies and slides. Even if you wanted to watch them (or subject friends / kids to them), digging out the old projector or VCR is a dicey proposition. Converting film to video or digital storage is possible to achieve DIY, but can be daunting and/or expensive — although with an HDSLR, the results can be pretty cool. […]

[…] Easy conversion of your old 8mm film to digital with the … – James Miller sent us his “quick guide on how to get 8mm footage direct to sensor on the Canon EOS 5D Mark II” which is pretty cool if you’ve got a bunch of old …… […]

[…] Easy conversion of your old 8mm film to digital with the … – Easy conversion of your old 8mm film to digital with the Canon EOS 5D Mark II … which is pretty cool if you’ve got a bunch of old 8mm films (maybe old family movies) that you’d like to convert to digital without paying an arm and a leg. […]